Jamie Sarkonak: All-inclusive migrant health plan will burden Canada for years to come

Asylum seekers walk along Roxham Road near Champlain, New York on August 6, 2017, making their way towards the Canada/US border. In recent days the number of people illegally crossing the border has grown into the hundreds. Photo by GEOFF ROBINS/AFP/Getty Images

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There are thousands of asylum seekers and illegal residents awaiting deportation who get more free health care than regular Canadian citizens. These all-inclusive care packages cost the public treasury $1 billion last year — and a recent attempt by the feds to bring it under control won’t help much, based on a Parliamentary Budget Officer report released Tuesday.

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Known as the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP), this freebie service provides the following to asylum seekers and rejects: hospital care, free doctor visits, free lab work, free ambulance trips. Before May 1, it also provided free medicine, and free “supplemental coverage”: vision and dental care, counselling, physiotherapy, speech language therapy, home care, medical supplies, etc. Earlier this month, the feds began requiring program users to pay a very modest $4 fee for prescriptions, and a 30 per cent co-pay for supplemental services.

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The small fees were added to reduce the cost of the program, which was estimated to be $1 billion in 2025-26 by the PBO in February. In 2029-30, without the addition of user fees, that number was expected to rise to $1.5 billion.

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This week’s PBO report accounted for the new fees, and, well, it’s not impressive. The IFHP is only expected to reduce the program cost by $162 million this year. By 2029, it’s expected that this reduction will reach $217 million (or $220 million, if you take into account the impact of Bill C-12, which put minor limits on who can claim asylum) — that means the cost of providing health care to unvetted migrants and asylum rejects will be about $1.3 billion, far higher than should be tolerable.

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Part of this comes down to the sheer volume of people coming to Canada to seek asylum:

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“While these savings are material, they do not offset the broader cost pressures driven by elevated volumes of new claimants,” notes the PBO report. “These pressures are compounded by longer durations of IFHP eligibility due to persistent backlogs, rising overall average per-beneficiary spending and health-care costs.”

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The longer an asylum seeker has to wait for their claim to be assessed, the more time they can take advantage of comprehensive, taxpayer-funded health care. The more asylum seekers there are, the longer the wait. The more appeals and deportation threat assessments asylum seekers make when they’re rejected, the less capacity there will be in the system to deal with them all. It doesn’t help that immigration authorities keep finding new ways to let deportation candidates stay in Canada for longer.

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There are so many claims in the queue right now that they will “continue driving costs” even if the number of new asylum claimants is reduced, adds the PBO.

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The costs don’t truly go away until asylum seekers are removed from Canada. Those who are accepted will continue to receive under their respective provincial programs, and those who are rejected continue to be eligible for the all-inclusive package.